Daphne Howland

There’s still charm in Charm City, despite it all.

We’re privy to the students’ backgrounds and get a tiny glimpse into their futures, but the film skims a lot in favor of showcasing the ISEF gathering. Still, as in the spelling-bee doc, these are moving stories of nerdy children, kids who are pragmatic about the forward march of industry yet believe societies can, and must, find cleaner ways to advance.

The doc never goes much deeper than the information and arguments on AI that can currently be found in the Sunday papers.

Love and tolerance are difficult to argue with, yet this effort seems pointless — not just because it will change few minds, but also because it’s a mess.

It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.

Sometimes a filmmaker is so taken with a subject that a documentary fizzles into hagiography, a problem of Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor From India, a film about Vasant Lad, who brought the ancient Indian healing practice of Ayurveda to the U.S. in the late 1970s.

Much of the film is beautiful — hot springs, the ocean’s depths, and deep space are photogenic — although Cheney preserves a few too many mundane “hello, how do you do”s, and the science isn’t deeply explained.

Full of such bon mots, the documentary is the epitome of positive thinking, perhaps the closest thing America has to a state religion. Still, like social worker Wendy Lustbader’s book What’s Worth Knowing, which took a similar tack years ago, it’s an opportunity to connect with souls who’ve been around more than a few blocks.

It’s a painfully familiar story in the era of #MeToo and the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, with the added agony that parents, teachers, and school officials were, to varying degrees, complicit.

Pilgrimages have potential: Geoffrey Chaucer gave us 24 good yarns in his Canterbury Tales. But there isn’t even one in the otherwise gorgeous documentary Strangers on the Earth.

It’s a brutal takedown of a practice now warping K-12 education and should embarrass every school that still requires them.

The Judge is packed tight; it’s enlightening and suspenseful and paced for maximum enjoyment. In the end, it’s not just about Kholoud Al-Faqih, but you’ll be very glad to have met her.

If Catena has flaws, filmmaker Kenneth Carlson declines to feature them, perhaps because they’ve been friends since their Brown University days thirty years ago. Still, the doctor has earned the adulation, and a visit to a leper colony shows why.

It’s quite a story, one that, like all good stories, turns out to have meaning for anyone.

Directors Harris and Sanin provide clear historical and present-day context and furnish alarming proof of Vladimir Putin’s multilayered deceptions.

In an era when the propaganda machines of conflicts like Syria are imperiling photojournalists’ work all the more, Campbell’s homage to his friend is a thorough look at a straight shooter.

James Demo’s The Peacemaker is an intense, intimate portrait of a visionary capable of sophisticated analysis, abrupt anger, self-deprecating wit, and profound insights — all while existing at considerable remove from his fellow man.

The film is a jumble, with no sense of meaningful interaction.

The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.

Denison keeps up the pace — those television skills coming in handy — and unpacks a lot. But he also allows in some light. There are plenty of Las Vegas police officers who want things to change, and Denison gives them, and the victims’ families, a voice.

It’s hard to know whether it’s intentional that The New Radical, Adam Bhala Lough’s slick documentary about “techno-anarchist” Cody Wilson, famous for developing a 3-D-printable plastic gun, presents its subject as a shallow pseudo-intellectual man-child.

Cristina Herrera Borquez’s elegant documentary No Dresscode Required is a masterful, layered story of commissar-crossed lovers.

Take My Nose…Please! rescues plastic surgery from Hollywood’s “did they or didn’t they?” gossip and reality television’s odious voyeurism with a nuanced, empathetic (and often funny) introduction to a few women, mostly comedians, who’ve had work done or are considering it.

Boston, Jon Dunham’s film about that city’s marathon, is a contender — an emotional comeback story, interspersed with thrilling moments in its history, without gloss, cliche or even nostalgia.

The short-subject treatment serves as a challenge that, in eighty minutes, writer-director Matthew Weiss doesn’t meet.

It’s a compelling look at a valuable contraption that’s slipping through our grasp, and will send many viewers to flea markets and eBay for one of their own.

Shen overplays his hand.

Celebrity testimonials drown out the scientists, and Galinsky’s haphazard exploration of his own back pain is a major distraction.

The doc is thorough.

John Griesser’s film about Srila Prabhupada, founder of the Krishna movement, is not so much a documentary as it is a hagiography.

Unfortunately, the doc is devoid of any real context, including how work such as Bell’s helped lead to the quagmire that has unsettled the region for decades.

The Incomparable Rose Hartman is a gorgeously shot, sharply edited portrait of photographer Hartman.

Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia is a superbly balanced picture of Cambodia then and now, a nation in a sort of stupor of post traumatic stress syndrome, denial and survivor's' guilt.

Unlike in so many films, here the actors’ portrayals of psychiatric patients’ conditions — and their humanity — ring true.

It's enjoyable spending some time with dreamy Vivek and Shveta (Melanie Kannokada, also known as Melanie Chandra), who are lovely together despite their clumsy communication.

The situation is heartbreaking and frustrating. But the film is so persuasive that it could help finally tank Herbalife's shares and validate Ackman's gamble — possibly preventing thousands of others.

The film's a little choppy as Theroux takes side trips to interview other former Scientologists, but it comes together as a chilling look at America's most famous 20th-century homegrown religion.

Rosenstein makes this a suspenseful legal yarn and an essential history lesson.

The movie is slow, quiet, and infuriating, as Binney and his small group are undermined by Gen. Michael Hayden's NSA and inept private contractors.

Desert flowers can be hard to spot, but are often distinctly beautiful, and The Bad Kids has them in focus.

It's the closest most of us will get to spending time with fellow humans who have extraordinary perspectives on ordinary things — and ordinary perspectives, too.

The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.

Ree makes things easy for people who don't play chess, deftly pacing Carlsen's triumphs and failures and milking the suspense as "the Mozart of chess" employs his intuition to win, in an age when many players depend on computers to hone their skills.

All Governments Lie is worthy testimony that many journalists are in it for the truth.

Demonstrating an egregious contempt for science, Biebert and his subjects attack the call for research into the effects of electronic cigarettes as nothing more than shilling for tax collectors and Big Pharma.

The film is a riveting feat of editing considering the material, the legalistic conundrums, and the profusion of detail.

This film is valuable on account of its singular vantage point, and not just because of the firsthand description of the jihadist group’s brutality, which is unsurprising.

Palast slices through all the B.S., and while he may be over-the-top in his presentation, keep in mind, he’s got just the facts, ma’am.

It's a wonder of photography, animation, and sound, and it's a testament to its editors that the many interviews with activists and scientists are compelling and informative, sometimes even poetic.

The gutting of America's public universities is, as Steve Mims says in his documentary Starving the Beast, "one of the nation's most important and least understood fights." His film goes far in correcting that, thanks not just to his thorough research, but also a strong narrative and compelling cinematography.

Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.

These are stories crafted with care, with glimpses of the filmmaking process — a chance to see the camera operators and director themselves at times in awe of the fortitude they're witnessing.

Despite the complexities, though, it's enjoyable, thanks to the crew's substantial expertise.

This well-researched investigation is loaded with credible facts and has a workaday, broadcast-newsmagazine feel.

Footage of the now-wealthy Smiths being deposed is damning, the brothers' legal jiujitsu is appalling, and the stories of deaths are heartbreaking.

In her provocative documentary Drone, Tonje Hessen Schei shows how, actually, the U.S. and its military-industrial complex treat war like a video game.

It's almost unbelievable how much people talk, in Slovick's two hours, without saying very much at all.

Shah Bob may be languid, interrupted by Rockford-style freeze-frames, but it's also intimate and captivating, and it calls to mind indie films from before Sundance made them mostly another Hollywood commodity.

The film suffers from some rookie problems.... But through it we can see the history and ramp-up of the military-esque police methods that have become our current crisis.

Kempner's film, which has an eat-your-vegetables quality, runs long and suffers from a lack of focus.... Still, it's inspiring how Rosenwald, who took full advantage of capitalism's potential, also shared, passionately and generously, his windfall.

The film doesn't quite trust its audience, though, and, rather than get in and out with its points, belabors its jokes and its punches, to the point of tedium.

The film fosters a very human connection to these pickers, whose eloquence comes from their plainspoken arguments, the austerity of their situation, and the modesty of their demands.

The film's editing is masterful, though, and with ample footage from the time and up-to-date storytelling from many key players from the African, Cuban, and U.S. governments, among others, Plot for Peace proves enthralling.

The documentary All You Need Is Love does a nice job of showing how, when it comes to children's lives, the ordinary is inescapable, even in extraordinary circumstances.

In this portrait, we are treated to an acquaintanceship with a woman in an almost constant search for a creative life, and that might be its most moving feature.

The Kaufmans are amateurs, in the sense that this is a labor of love but also in that the film lacks the technical and storytelling caliber of more professional work. Many cuts are awkward and the sound is terrible. Still, it’s another full box revealing how people narrowly escaped brutalities, and how some didn’t.

It helps that Earle and her oceanographer colleague at the Smithsonian Institute, Jeremy Jackson, are both scientists with unusual abilities to speak not just in understandable terms but also in eloquent ones. And it helps, too, that the music, images, storytelling, and editing are all so tight, and so enjoyable.

While the film also captures many private, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, it takes a lot of time to make its simple point.

What the film does accomplish is making you think, especially about how universities are spending their ever-increasing tuition on top-notch campus amenities and their own disastrous loans, and how state governments and federal agencies are similarly passing off their education cuts onto the young people who they expect to one day run the economy and society.

There are many reasons to see this very difficult film, not least to face the grim realities in Liberia, and to wonder what more could be done to save lives and preserve the human spirit when it is so clearly yearning to burn bright given any small small chance.

This film is like another work in the canon of baseball poetry.

This film shows what was clearly a profound set of experiences for both Ndibalema and Kenney, but it is not much more than a well-made vacation slideshow or an extended Facebook post, complete with exclamation points.

While his obsessiveness seems neurotic, and watching this film is not always comfortable, it also seems to be all part of the process.

Vargas lingers for long stretches over his personal story and his complicated relationship with his mother, still in the Philippines -- a place he dare not visit for fear of being unable to return. But his story is a vivid illustration of the pickle we're in.

It all remains cohesive, even poetic, and puts what had to have been formidable reporting to excellent use.

Medalia, as an Israeli, knows this bumpy territory well and serves up her story sensitively, but with its difficulties unvarnished and unsolved. She focuses on a few children whom we get to know well enough to care very much about their progress.

This film is one of our best documents of the civil rights era, but it is also a portrait of someone with a singular perspective, a big mind, and a joyous aptitude for conversation.

Morin's idea of wedging a political thriller into this historical moment is brilliant, but he undermines his story with broad caricatures and a phlegmatic pace.

Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.

Joe Berlinger's Hank: 5 Years From the Brink is more workaday and less transfixing than projects of his like "Brother's Keeper" or "Paradise Lost."

Solnicki's spliced-together, back-and-forth approach at first seems a jumble, but of course his choices are deliberate, and they pile up into revealing art.

Creadon unveils his story in a haphazard, backwards-unfolding way.

Despite the film's hyper but insubstantial presentation of its information, there likely is a story here.

This is a sober look at how seaboards are vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels, made worse by storms and massively worse by massive storms.

Watching the animated memoir Approved for Adoption can stir a serenity like skipping stones on water for a delightfully long time.

The possible hereditary nature of suicide in general and of the seven known Hemingway suicides in particular is lazily poked at; decades of research go unmentioned and unexplored.